By Steve Wishnia

A group of nine retired transit workers has filed a class-action suit in New York State Supreme Court, seeking to get their access to traditional Medicare restored after they were switched to a private Medicare Advantage plan on Jan. 1.

By Steve Wishnia

“If it keeps going the way it’s going, there’s going to be a murder,” subway-train operator Evangeline Byars tells Work-Bites.

On Feb. 16, a 58-year-old station agent in the Wall Street station suffered a fractured eye socket when she was attacked by a man she’d woken up from sleeping under a bench.

By Joe Maniscalco

Union-busting companies know how to deal with walkouts, sickouts, boycotts — and even limited strikes — pretty handily under existing labor law. But how in the world do they confront a theatrical production that puts their exploitation and worker abuses center stage?

How do they contend with art?

Editor’s Note: This story originally appeared in The Capitol Hill Citizen and CorporateCrimeReporter.com

By Bob Hennelly

The confluence of ending billions of dollars in federal direct COVID aid — and Governor Greg Abbott [R-Texas] sending tens of thousands of asylum-seeking migrants to New York City — has members of the New York State Legislature calling for an end to the state rebating the one-tenth-of-one-percent Stock Transfer Tax [STT] that was enacted in the early 1900s — but has been refunded back to Wall Street since the 1980s.

By Joe Maniscalco

Former New York City schoolteachers instrumental in beating back the campaign to push 250,000 municipal retirees into a profit-driven Medicare Advantage health insurance program have launched a bold new campaign to seize control of the UFT’s Retired Teachers Chapter — and put a real check on entrenched union president Michael Mulgrew’s unchallenged power.

Editor’s Note: The following letter from Charles Komanoff, a NYC safe-streets activist and mathematician whose traffic modeling has been influential in congestion pricing advocacy, comes in response to last week’s Work-Bites story about labor opposition to the MTA’s congestion pricing plan.

To the Editor:

You reported last week (NYC Unions Reject MTA Congestion Pricing, Call for Ending Stock Transfer Tax Rebate Instead) that most of the 102 unions making up the Municipal Labor Committee were joining the federal lawsuit against the MTA’s congestion pricing (CP) program filed last month by United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew and Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella.

By Bob Hennelly

A growing coalition of New York City’s unions are speaking out against  the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s plans to impose a  congestion pricing fee on vehicles entering Manhattan with several labor leaders suggesting Albany should instead start collecting the state’s Stock Transfer Tax that it has been rebating back to Wall Street since the early 1980s.

By Steve Wishnia

A group of retired New York City transit workers is again seeking a court order to restore their access to traditional Medicare.

The group, TWU100R, is filing an amended petition before State Supreme Court judge Shahabuddeen A. Ally, challenging Transport Workers Union Local 100’s 2023 contract, which eliminated the about 22,000 retirees’ option to keep traditional Medicare. Instead, they were required to enroll in one of two profit-driven Medicare Advantage plans run by Aetna as of January 1. Much like other retirees across the country fighting similar battles, they are arguing that the change illegally diminishes their health-care benefits.

By Joe Maniscalco

New preliminary findings recently released by the National Transportation Safety Board looking into January 4’s subway collision on the No. 1 line near the 96th Street station in Manhattan corroborate statements from outspoken Transit workers who tell Work-Bites the system in rife with radio “dead spots.”

By Joe Maniscalco

This is gonna be the year the City of New York finally steps up, passes the “No More 24” bill, and ends the round-the-clock workdays steadily grinding home health aides — predominantly older women of color — down to the bone right before everyone’s eyes.

If not, they vow to go on hunger strike to make it happen.

By Bob Hennelly

“The bosses wear Prada, and the workers get nada!” chanted hundreds of News Guild CWA workers out on a one-day strike against Conde Nast, the publishing juggernaut that owns iconic titles like Vogue, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Bon Appetite. The boisterous picket line at the base of One World Trade Center in lower Manhattan on a damp day January 24, drew a cacophony of honking horns whizzing by on West Street.

To the Editor: With the settlement of more than 90% of City labor union contracts, the New York City Managerial Employees Association (NYC MEA) has called on the City to grant similar retroactive across-the-board pay raises and one-time bonuses for City managers. Subject to the New York State Taylor Law, managerial employees cannot unionize and are not bound by collective bargaining contracts.

By Steve Wishnia

More than 200 Carpenters Union members picketed the Manhattan offices of an Australian real-estate developer Jan. 11, demanding that it stop using nonunion labor on a massive luxury development on the Brooklyn waterfront.

“It’s not only that it’s a nonunion contractor,” Michael Piccirillo, area standards manager for the New York City & Vicinity District Council of Carpenters, told Work-Bites. “It’s someone who in the past defrauded a union pension fund.”

By Bob Hennelly

This week, after two independent agencies flagged the accuracy of the Adams administration’s budget projections and reporting on critical data like the number of homeless, Mayor Adams reversed course on several controversial budget cuts that were part of his November austerity budget plan to close what he said was a $7 billion budget shortfall.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Over the holidays, New Jersey Gov. Murphy, Lieutenant Gov. Way, Senate President Scutari, and Assembly Speaker Coughlin put out a self-congratulatory press release saying how “incredibly proud” they were that the state’s minimum was set to increase to $15.13 an hour with the New Year. In their statement the state’s leaders said that because of a 2019 change in state law the increase was “indexed annually to inflation” guaranteeing that “working families won’t fall behind when prices go up.”

You have to wonder what planet these people occupy.

By Bob Hennelly

Nothing says depression and anxiety like being New York City parents of three small children and having to deal with an eviction notice that’s effective between Christmas and New Year’s Day when the rest of the world is celebrating abundance.

By Steve Wishnia

Commercial-building cleaners in New York City and hospital and university service workers in Rochester have won significant raises and averted threatened strikes this week.

By Bob Hennelly

Courtesy of InsiderNJ

Angels and demons ride the rails and New Jersey Transit conductors and collectors have to collect tickets from them all. And on too many occasions, the rail workers get verbally and physically abused in the process.

By Steve Wishnia

Just before 3 p.m. on the Friday before Christmas, workers at the Barnes & Noble flagship bookstore on Union Square walked out for two hours to protest management’s refusal to bargain with their recently formed union. Shoppers approaching the store’s dark-green doors got greeted with chants of “Picket Line Means Don’t Cross!”

By Joe Maniscalco

New York City home health aides would like to brand City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams as a “Grinch” or a “Scrooge” this holiday season for stubbornly suppressing a bill outlawing exploitive 24-hour work shifts — but they really can’t.

Both of those twisted characters had a change of heart come Christmas Day. Adams’ heart will likely remain two-sizes too small this year because of…machine politics.